A guy a know that coded a new PHP board (based off PHPBB) made a donation system.

1) Users who donated money were given one green star for every $20 they donated, the amount could be set to any amount of money to equal a star. This could easily be changed to any symbol.

2) Users who donated $20 got a pre-selected avatar (an image of a car that you could select from about 15 different colors) and users who donated $100 got to have their own customizable avatar (based on the URL of the image). You could set size limits or dimension limits on the image.

3) A member with 5 stars ($100) had access to a 5-Star section of the club, that is not viewable to any of the members except the 5-star guys. Only they had rights to post in there.

This is by far the best (and only) system I have seen and it resides here:

http://www.probetalk.com/

This WILL be gone very soon though as they are switching over to vBulletin but the Donation hack is being worked on.

Here is a basic posting:

http://64.60.145.228/forums/viewtopi...591&forum=1&37

You'll see there are quite a few members who have donated and you can easily distinguish them, either by number of stars, the default image, or a customized image.

Here is my profile on that board, notice it says how much money I have donated (it doesn't say it on the main section, it's only shown by green stars):

http://64.60.145.228/forums/bb_profi...view&user=4924